Why You Should Call Your Parents

It's not expressing my gratitude to my father before he passed away. That is a classic connection regret, 'cause it's basically a regret about not reaching out. Connection regrets are about relationships that have come apart, usually through some kind of drift. And this is a classic example of that. What typically happens if relationships drift apart, and, and what's interesting, these relationships are usually not romantic relationships. The relationships like this one here, the relationships, parents and children, children and parents, siblings, other relatives, friends, colleagues.

Yeah.

What happens is, is that the relationships drift apart. This person is not, I'm not suggesting any kind of massive rift between her and her father.

No, no, not at all.

It's more of a drift. The way that these relationships sometimes come apart is not very dramatic. And so what happens is people get to the juncture. Okay, regrets begin at a juncture. Should I reach out? Should I not reach out? Should I express my gratitude? Should I not? And she's going to say, or he is going to say, you know what, it's going to be kind of awkward if I just like say, just one day walk up to my father and say, oh, Dad, I love you and I'm so grateful for everything you've done. It's gonna be so awkward for me. It's gonna be so awkward for me to say something like that. And you know what? He's not gonna really care one way or another. He's gonna find it a little creepy. And so we don't do it. And so more time goes on. And then in this case, so much time goes on that you don't have a chance. And here's where we're wrong. It's not awkward. It's way less awkward than we think. We so overpredict our feelings of awkwardness. The second is that there is a form of pluralistic ignorance here. In that there's no question that her father would've loved to hear that. I can't imagine a father who wouldn't wanna hear that.

Yeah.

And so we think it's gonna be awkward and we think the other side's not gonna care. And the answer is, is that it's very rarely awkward and the other side always cares. So for me, as a personal lesson from this material, as someone who hasn't been in his life that great about reaching out, is that if you're at a juncture in your life and you're wondering, should I reach out or should I not reach out? Should I express my gratitude or should I not express my gratitude? Should I say something or should I not say something? If you've reached that juncture, you've answered the question. Always reach out.

Always reach out. What a powerful, powerful message.

We can even rhyme it to make it even stickier. When in doubt, reach out.

Love it. Love it. Definitely from America coming in with this punchy. I love it. I love it. But you know, I'm really hoping, Dan, that there's a world, right, with a lot of negativity going on at the moment. And I'm hoping that this podcast, this conversation is gonna spread a bit of love.

I hope so.

Around the world. And I'm hoping everyone who listens or watches literally now take a break or at the end of the conversation, do you know what? Reach out to someone, maybe tell your mom or your dad how much you value them. Wouldn't that be amazing?

That would be— Honestly, if everyone did that. Honestly, I'm not joking. That would be extraordinary. Like that would keep— if people actually did that, that might keep me in the writing business for a couple more weeks.